Suncatchers (28 page)

He looked around. Beth had no decor as such. It was not the kind of living room that would be written up in
House Beautiful
. Amid the brown throw rugs, black-and-white photographs, tan drapes, and cheap end tables, the couch provided the only splash of color. Where had Beth ever found such a hideous plaid anyway—lime green, junkyard rust, Halloween orange, and mustard yellow? It reminded Perry of a combination of nasty things—stagnant ponds, spoiled food left in refrigerators, infectious diseases, noxious weeds.

He ran his hand across the stiff, rough fabric and wondered what kind of person would go to a furniture showroom and actually choose this couch. Knowing Beth, he was certain that she had bought it through the want ads. Maybe it was among the household goods being sold after a death, or maybe a divorce. Perhaps it had even been the source of a long-running argument between the husband, who had bought the couch for his bachelor pad before his marriage and was attached to it, and his wife, who loathed the sight of it and nagged him to haul it out to the curb. Maybe she had finally declared an ultimatum: Either the couch goes or I do. Maybe in the nanosecond during which the husband was considering how to phrase his reply, she had exploded and said, “Okay, if that's the way you want it, buster, you got it!” If only women weren't so quick to take offense, so ready to leap to conclusions. Of course, the man should have had better taste in the beginning and not chosen such an unsightly plaid. Perry shook his head to clear his mind.

A tall bookcase of unfinished wood stood against the wall by the door. Perry had already looked through the books and even read parts of two or three. One night he had browsed for several hours through a copy of the
Guinness Book of World Records
, filled with disbelief that somebody had thought of collecting all that remarkable data—the highest price paid for a lock of hair, the largest number of piglets born in a single litter, the greatest distance for spitting a watermelon seed, the longest kiss in a movie—and then not only had
thought
of it but had gone to all the trouble to actually do it. The thought had come to Perry that many people would consider the book he was writing now—the one about the church here in Derby—to be just as pointless as this one. Or worse, what if they considered it
cute
? After all, what was the difference, really, between recording that the Sparkies Sunday school class had collected fourteen dollars and thirty-two cents to send to a Navajo mission and listing Snowball as the oldest caged guinea pig?

And on the bottom shelf of Beth's books, he had come across a Bible a week after moving in. He had been taking it to church ever since. It still surprised him that Beth had kept a Bible. Inside the front cover was an inscription written with a dark blue fountain pen that had bled through to the other side of the tissue-thin paper.
To Katrina from Mother and Daddy
, it read, and underneath, the date
September 15, 1939
.

He had figured it up immediately. The Bible would have been a gift to his mother from her parents on her sixteenth birthday. It appeared never to have been used. He tried to picture his mother reading a Bible but couldn't. He couldn't picture her reading anything for that matter. Though he had often seen her sitting in her green armchair with a book or magazine open in her lap, her eyes had always been staring through the page or at the printed design on her dress or at the armrest covers on the chair. She had rarely turned a page. Only once could Perry recall his mother reading him a story, when he had dragged out an enormous book of illustrated fairy tales. He must have been only four or five, and he remembered sitting in her lap. He didn't remember the story itself, though, only the traumatic effect of her sudden and violent embrace as she broke into sobs halfway through it. Then she had released him abruptly, looking at him as if she wasn't sure who he was, and stood up. He had almost hit his head on the hardwood floor when he toppled off her lap.

His eyes traveled over Beth's shelves of books. He had never known his sister's interests were so varied. There were books about orchids, Etruscan art, the U.S. Naval Academy, labor unions, Erma Bombeck's breast cancer, and Martin Van Buren. He couldn't imagine her keeping books unless she really liked them. Beth wasn't the pack rat type. They were all neatly stowed, arranged by height and pulled out so that they all rested exactly one inch from the edge of each shelf. Now he noticed that the top shelf held tall thick volumes—catalogs of some kind—and what looked like several photo albums. He had never looked up that high before.

He rose from the couch, crossed over to the bookcase, and pulled down the four photo albums. A little flurry of dust motes sifted toward the floor.

Two of the albums were old—a dusky maroon color, with the corners of the pictures tucked inside trim little triangular tabs—and two were newer. Perry settled himself back on the couch and opened one of the old ones first. Though he couldn't remember ever having seen any of the pictures, he recognized the main characters immediately. His mother had been quite pretty as a girl, with a pale aristocratic face and small features. In contrast, her hair had been dark and abundant. In most of the pictures she was smiling, and in one she had her head thrown back in laughter. Perry stared at that one a long time. She looked to be thirteen or fourteen. She wouldn't have laughed, he thought sadly, if she had known what lay ahead of her in life.

In another picture a few pages over, his mother's whole family was gathered on the wide front porch of their house. Her parents—who by this time would have already given her the Bible—were standing on the top steps, looking unprepared for the taking of the picture. Her mother was pointing downward at one of the younger children, it must have been Uncle Joel, who was examining a scab on his knee. Her father was gazing off to the side—perhaps toward a cornfield about which he was worried. Perry's mother, Katrina, had been the only daughter, with two older brothers, then Uncle Joel and Uncle Louis, both younger. In the picture she was sitting on a step with her hands encircling her knees, looking straight into the camera with a coquettish smile. She wore a wide light-colored ribbon in her dark hair. Perry realized that all the people in the picture except Uncle Louis were dead now. It was an oppressive thought.

He flipped over several pages. His father began showing up in pictures—sitting in the porch swing twirling a hat on his finger, half-lying on the hood of an old Studebaker, standing in a victory pose under a banner that read “Class of '40,” grinning out the window of a bus. It was easy to see how charming he had been and how completely a girl could have fallen for those charms, especially if she had grown up on a farm and he had moved to their small community from the big city of Chicago. It wouldn't have even mattered to her that she was two years older than he was. One picture of him in a uniform had a message scrawled across one corner: “Katrina, Yours until the sand in the hourglass of Time runs out, Allen.”

But it had taken Katrina nine more years of sand trickling through the hourglass of Time to get Allen to marry her. He must have been a genius at thinking up excuses, one after another—first, the horrors of war, of course, then a lengthy and complicated recovery from the horrors of war, then finding a suitable job after recovering from the horrors of war, then . . . on and on. Finally, Perry supposed, his father had given in from exhaustion and married her. Perry wondered how many good years they'd had before his mother stopped laughing, stopped smiling, stopped talking—until the hourglass had run dry. He felt a flash of irritation at her. She should have been suspicious of the words his father had written on his army picture. The sand in an hourglass doesn't last long—an hour to be exact. But maybe she had thought she would never tire of turning the glass over to start another hour.

Beth must have taken the two older photo albums when she had gone through their mother's things. The two newer ones, however, were clearly her own. Perry had never seen these either. He opened one of them and was surprised to find a chronicle of pictures detailing Beth's life from her high school years until quite recently. On second thought, he wasn't surprised at all. Anyone who kept a Day-Timer would go in for this sort of thing. He had no doubt that she also kept an updated address book and careful service records on her car. Each picture in the albums had a caption handwritten in Beth's meticulous bold print with a fine-nibbed black marker—the kind of humorous captions they used to put in old yearbooks, like “Whoa there, Gracie, not so fast” or “Tea for two” or “Anybody need a lift?”

He flipped through the pages swiftly but then stopped suddenly at a picture with the caption “Big brother makes a catch.” At first Perry had no recollection of posing for the picture. He was standing on the lawn of the house in Rockford where he had grown up, wearing a pair of plaid bell-bottom slacks and sporting a bushy head of hair with an amazing pair of sideburns, and beside him stood Dinah, her long straight hair covering half her face as she looked down at her left hand. He bent down closer to the snapshot, and all at once he remembered clearly.

It had been spring break, and they had driven to Rockford to show his mother Dinah's engagement ring. Beth had ridden with them and studied calculus in the backseat the whole way. It was the first time his mother and Dinah had met each other, and Dinah's high spirits had seemed to pain his mother. She had spent the whole three days exiting whatever room Dinah entered. Beth had snapped the picture in the front yard right before they left to go back to college. In the background Perry could see the faint outline of his mother standing in the threshold behind the screen door with the decorative grillwork of an iron flamingo—the same doorway across which his father had fallen, disheveled and out of his senses, years earlier.

19

Fractured Blues and Purples

“Shh, listen! Stop!” Eldeen cried, waving both hands. Perry stopped in midswing, and the badminton birdie fell at his feet.

“It sounds like it's coming this way,” Jewel said from the other side of the net. Eldeen stood up from her lawn chair and cocked her head at different angles. Her floral turquoise muumuu flared about her like a gaudy tent, and she wore large pink canvas sneakers. Joe Leonard leaned forward in his chair as the sound of the siren grew louder.

Then through the dogwood trees along the back fence, they saw the spinning light and the gleam of red as a fire truck sped past on Lily Lane, then turned onto Daffodil Street. Slowly the siren's wail diminished.

Eldeen sat back down, arranging the folds of her muumuu, and Perry stooped to pick up the birdie.

“My heart near about stops whenever I hear one of them sirens,” Eldeen said, fanning herself with both hands. “You just always think, ‘Maybe it's my very own house on fire, and I don't even
know
it! Maybe a neighbor spotted the smoke billowin' out the front door, and here I am a'settin' in the backyard just as trustin' as a baby.' I heard once of a deaf man who was hoeing turnips back behind his garage, and his wife had a grease fire in the kitchen and the whole house practically burned up before he was even the slightest bit aware of anything going on. He did say later in the newspaper that he kept catching a whiff of something that smelled peculiar, but he thought it was the neighbor's compost.”

“The score's still nine-ten,” Joe Leonard said. He was sitting beside Eldeen, his racket balanced across both knees and his arms folded.

Perry half hoped Jewel would win this game so he could sit the next one out. But it was only during the brief lulls before a serve that he hoped that. In the middle of each point, he surprised himself at the lengths to which he would go to win the point. He had never considered himself very competitive before now. Although sports had always come naturally to him, he had generally held back just a little, even as a child on the school playground, never sure if he could really pull it off. Dinah used to tell people she had married an avid spectator.

When Jewel had first invited him to play badminton with them one night after supper back in June, Perry had approached the game with a somewhat condescending air, assuming it to be a genteel pastime for people who liked to pretend they were getting some exercise. He envisioned Victorian ladies in long white dresses and enormous veiled hats taking dainty feather-soft strokes with their slender racquets while another group played croquet in the background.

He had been thoroughly trounced that first day by both Jewel and Joe Leonard, had felt his heart pounding with exertion, had perspired heavily, and had awakened the next morning with sore muscles. He wondered how he had ever gotten the idea that badminton was a sport for sissies. Since the first match, he had begun trying in a way he couldn't remember ever doing before. He knew now how strenuous a good game of badminton was, but not everyone did. He'd hate to have it known that he routinely lost to a woman and a boy.

“Earl Vanderhoff was telling me last Sunday that every last scrap of his family's earthly possessions went up in smoke in a house fire when he was a boy,” Eldeen said after Jewel won a point by lightly flipping the birdie just inches over the net.

“Ten-ten,” Joe Leonard said.

“And his family had to live out in the barn for a whole summer with the cows and horses and what have you. Imagine what
that
must of been like”—she flapped one hand in front of her nose as if fending off a bad smell—“and his mama had to do all the cookin' in the farmyard over a open fire.”

Jewel served the birdie, and Perry returned it low and hard to her backhand side.

“They all slept up in the hayloft,” Eldeen continued, “and Earl says them was some of the happiest memories of his whole childhood.”

Jewel swept the birdie back across the net, but it was high and short—the perfect setup for what Joe Leonard called a “zinger.” Perry raised his racquet and watched the birdie fall in a plumb line toward him.